We bagged the issue today, loaded it into the new van. It’s nice to be able to put it all in one car. Shelly and I did most of the hauling, drove to the bulk mailing center ourselves. It was strenuous and my clothes were a mess afterwards, covered with grime, but I likely needed the exercise.

Back at Locus, we still had to get a lot of the First Class out, and all of the Air Mail. Charlie didn’t like the way I’d packed the envelopes. He grabbed a stapler and tried to fold the flap tighter, succeeded only in tearing it. Then he decided to get upset about the fact that there wasn’t a red stamp reading “AIR MAIL” on the Air Mail packages. (The things have gone through just fine with just the word “AIRMAIL” on the labels, and Charlie had no problem in the past.) Enraged, Shelly ended up stamping them until the boxes looked like they had the measles before we drove them down to the post office.

There was a disturbing story today in the paper. Many scientists believe that this year’s drought can be blamed on the Greenhouse Effect. If that is the case, we can expect many more years as dry as this one.

The bulk mailing center was part of the massive post office center in West Oakland. It’s still a major landmark and stop on the BART ride into San Francisco, a blocky brick comples seen from overhead when you’re riding a train. We would drive there from Montclair (in the past we’d had to use two cars), pull up in the loading area, and toss into a vast metal container mailbags filled with squares of magazines bound together by zip code. The mailbags were rough canvas and always dirty, hence the state of my clothes afterwards. I mainly remember it as the sun on stacks of canvas bags piled in an enormous bin, distant lines of shabby West Oakland houses , a couple of times the sound of distant gunfire — yes, in broad daylight. That part of West Oakland could be dangerous.

Once, I chipped a front tooth because the metal buckle on a bag struck me in the mouth as I swung it into the bin.

The “Greenhouse Effect” was what we called Global Warming back then. It was still a new concept to most of us. And yes — we had many more dry years ahead of us.